The issue is that housing should not be an investment but due to rising labor and materials costs and also more restrictive code, they are now an investment.
Housing - more generally real estate property - can absolutely be a legitimate asset class, sustaining speculation and global investment; that is how we get capital invested in building out housing infrastructure.
But you shouldn’t have to make a leveraged loan-backed investment in a single asset class in order to afford shelter.
The problem isn’t ’housing is an investment’, it’s that people are long not on ‘housing’ but on their own single specific house. That’s a horrendously undiversified portfolio.
It should not be a good investment - it should, over time, boil down to below inflation once you take maintenance and taxes into consideration.